hello,

i have an unraid license since the old times and i came across a server so i thought i'd give the self hosting hobby another try

however, as a lot has changed since the last time i used unraid, i've spent the last two days reading and watching youtube videos about setting up the storage

looks like everybody has their strong opinion that array is better or that pools are better because they're faster, but each of them has a different hardware and needs so it's not very helpful

so i came here to ask for advice, how would you personally configure the storage if you had an R720 with 256gb ram, 8x16tb spinning drives and a 256 gb ssd connected to sata port on the motherboard (the cdrom port)?

for starters i'm going to install immich and use it as a backup for my windows pc and whatever useful software as docker containers i'm going to come across.

i'm not planing to use any vms or the server as a media delivery or storage (as in hoarding movies i'm never going to watch again).

would you create a main array with 2 parity or a pool with raidz2 or both or anything else?

thank you!!!

HDDs in XFS array, 1 parity should be fine for that many. SSD as btrfs or zfs cache pool, if you want redundancy add another SSD to the pool.

Don't enable docker before installing cache so the docker shares can be created on cache.